BERKELEY, CA — ARMONK, NY and BERKELEY, CA, March
22, 2002 -- IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy
Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) today announced a collaboration
to begin deploying the first systems on a nationwide computing grid which
will empower researchers to tackle scientific challenges beyond the capability
of existing computers.

Beginning with two IBM supercomputers and a massive IBM storage repository,
the DOE Science Grid will ultimately grow into a system capable of processing
more than five trillion calculations per second and storing information
equivalent to 200 times the number of books in the Library of Congress.
The collaboration will make the largest unclassified supercomputer and
largest data storage system within DOE available via the Science Grid
by December 2002 - two years sooner than expected.

The DOE Science Grid will also give scientists around the country access
to far-flung supercomputers and data storage in the same way that an electrical
grid provides consumers with access to widely dispersed power-generating
resources.

"Computing and data grids will establish a uniform computing and
data handling environment -- independent of location - that can be integrated
with scientists' work environment in much the same way that the Web provided
a way to integrate on-line documents into the scientific work environment,"
said Horst Simon, director of the NERSC Division at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). "Undertaking such a large and
long-term project, we are especially pleased to be working with IBM, which
has made grid computing central to its e-business strategy."

Simon added, "Connecting supercomputer centers to grids will provide
the scientific community with a much more capable set of computing and
data management tools than those available today, and tools that can be
used more easily and effectively than today's tools. This should have
a substantial productivity benefit for scientific R&D, and will open
up entirely new avenues of exploration."

"The DOE Science Grid is a template for the kind of system that
can enable partnerships between public institutions and private companies
aimed at creating new products and technologies for business," said
Peter Ungaro, vice president, high-performance computing, IBM Server Group.
"This collaboration between IBM and NERSC is a big step forward in
realizing Grid's promise of delivering computing resources as a utility-like
service."

The Emerging Grid

Grids allow geographically distributed organizations to share applications,
data and computing resources. An emerging model of computing, Grids are
built with clusters of servers joined together over the Internet, using
protocols provided by the Globus open source community (Globus.org) and
other open technologies, including Linux (R).

The DOE Science Grid's goal is to enhance the ability of DOE scientists
to explore the physical world through computational simulation and scientific
experiments and analysis of the resulting data. The Science Grid will
enable scientists at national laboratories and universities around the
country to perform ever-greater calculations, manage and analyze ever-larger
datasets, and perform ever-more complex computer modeling necessary for
DOE to accomplish its scientific missions. In the future, supercomputers,
data storage and experimental facilities at Berkeley Lab, Argonne, Oak
Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories are all expected to
be connected to the DOE Science Grid.

The DOE Science Grid will give scientists real-time access to the trillions
of bytes of data that are stored at national labs around the country.
This kind of seamless access to information is required for large-scale
projects such as genomic and astrophysics research, which generate much
more data than can be stored in a single location.

As it evolves into a reliable infrastructure supporting scientific R&D,
the DOE Science Grid will also facilitate development and use of collaboration
tools that speed up research and allow scientists to tackle more complex
problems. NERSC is located at Berkeley Lab which has been developing distributed
collaboration and distributed data handling technology for the past 10
years. This decade-long effort provided some of the precursor grid tools
and technologies.

"The combination of NERSC and the DOE Science Grid should provide
an unprecedented capability for incorporating high-end simulation and
data handling into the scientists' working environment where it can be
combined with local compute and data systems, and eventually with the
experiments themselves," said Bill Johnston, head of Berkeley Lab's
Distributed Systems Department and one of the architects of the DOE Science
Grid. "NERSC provides DOE's Office of Science with its major tools
for computational simulation and data analysis and storage, so this integration
of the most capable computing facilities directly with the scientists'
working environment is what will create new levels of scientific capability
and productivity."

NERSC, which operates a 3,328-processor IBM supercomputer (currently
the third most powerful computer on earth, according to the TOP500 List
of Supercomputers), had originally planned to make its high-performance
computing systems accessible via the DOE Science Grid by 2004. The collaboration
announced today will allow a core group of NERSC's 2,100 users to begin
accessing resources via the DOE Science Grid two years earlier than originally
planned.

"We have been working closely with IBM since the installation of
our IBM supercomputer in 2000. Because we have a common interest in advancing
Grid technology, it made sense to work together," said Bill Kramer,
who is in charge of NERSC's computer operations. "As DOE's flagship
center for unclassified computing, making our resources more easily and
more widely accessible via the Grid will enhance research across a broad
spectrum of scientific disciplines."

In addition to the large IBM supercomputer system, DOE Science Grid software
will be integrated into NERSC's HPSS (High Performance Storage System)
archival data storage system, which has a capacity of 1.3 petabytes and
is managed using IBM servers. NERSC and IBM have a strong history of working
together to bring new technology to bear on the most challenging scientific
problem. For example, NERSC and IBM are two of the six development partners
that created and improved the HPSS. NERSC also operates a 160-processor
IBM Netfinity cluster computer system.

By the end of the year, all three of NERSC's IBM systems are expected
to be on the Grid. To do this, IBM will develop its software to be compatible
with Globus and other Grid software, and NERSC will then move the software
into service. NERSC and IBM will also use the collaboration to identify
areas where the Grid software can be improved.

Additional information about NERSC is available at www.nersc.gov.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located
in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research
and is managed by the University of California. Visit our Website at www.lbl.gov/.